Shagun Singh

Working, researching and playing with design, architecture and technology defines my endeavors as a designer and a human being. World politics, big cities and human relationships interest me. My favourite hours of the day are spent sitting with my machine with a big cup of coffee and designing new ways of interacting with the spaces and machines around us.

Working, researching and playing with design, architecture and technology defines my endeavors as a designer and a human being. World politics, big cities and human relationships interest me. My favorite hours of the day are spent sitting with my machine with a big cup of coffee and designing new ways of interacting with the spaces and machines around us.

Experience

Apr
2012 - Present

Principal Designer / Urban Matter Inc.

Urban Matter Inc is a creative studio that helps organizations in public and private sectors create meaningful experiences using participatory media and design.

Jan
2011 -
Apr
2012

Interaction Designer / frog design, NY

Aug
2010 -
Dec
2010

Freelance UX Designer / C&G Partners

May
2010 -
Jul
2010

Freelance UX Designer / 2x4

Jan
2010 -
Apr
2010

Freelance Interaction Designer / Antenna Design

Aug
2008 -
Oct
2009

User Experience Designer / Method

Sept
2006 -
Jun
2008

Architecture Professional / SOM

Responsibilities include working for the Innovation team on projects involving interactive and media based architecture.

Jun
2006 -
Sept
2006

Freelance designer / American Museum of Natural History

Interaction Design

Jan
2005 -
Jun
2006

Technology Specialist / Advanced Media Studio

Work involved operating and maintaining the Laser cutter and the 3D Rapid prototyping machine to assist student and faculty art projects at NYU.

For the past couple of years, I have been working on an interdisciplinary studio that operates at the intersection of art, architecture, and technology called Urban Matter. We are reluctant artists and most of our work in one way or the other caters to the wants of a user, community, city or a client, which probably makes us designers more than artists. Our relationship with various emerging technologies is significant. We use it for prototyping (in the shape of 3D printing, laser cutting), to create interactivity (using arduino, raspberry pi or makey makey), to tell stories (using projection mapping or LCD screens) or to simply light up a space (using LEDs and fiber optics). We use it as a tool and as inspiration. Even though most of our work comes from a place of detailed process and design research, we love the idea of using the latest and greatest technique out there to do something novel. Is technology the main highlight of our work? No, but it is a significant aspect of what we do. It seduces us and at the same time challenges us. We have a love and hate relationship with it. On one hand, the awe and wonder that can be created using todays tools and technologies helps us create interesting experiences, on the other hand, it is restricting to always rely on wifi connectivity and power sources. Maintenance of such work can be an unending list of things as well.

But lets get back to the inspirational side of things. I recently saw a presentation by the amazing Anab Jain at the Design Crit Program at SVA. Her studio Superflux weaves scenarios around the future of technology. It is fascinating how true some of these make believe scenarios can be. In a way, they are almost predicting the future even if it seems to be a bit bleak. A trip to the recently renovated Cooper Hewitt Museum was inspiring in a different way. All the interactive content was done by Local Projects which is a media design company, best known for all the work they did for the 9/11 museum. The seemless integration of real time 3D with touch screen technology created quite a stir but quickly became commonplace. A reminder of when the wow dies down, things become familiar and habitual. Brighter and lighter things then take their place. It is a challenge to work in a business where a big component of the business (aka tech) changes every day, every minute.

My relationship with all things technical started early. While growing up in mostly remote Indian military cantonments, I watched a lot of TV primarily because there really wasn’t a lot other stuff going on. In a way it was like growing up in an American suburb, only a bit more dangerous. Movies like Gattaca and shows like X Files were always a favorite. Scully was a role model for me and weirdly so a driving force in a lot of early decisions around career and colleges. The characters analytical mind was truly inspiring and something I hoped to emulate. 20 years later, I know that I could have never been anything like Dana Scully. But my career list did comprise of an entomologist, a microbiologist, a physicist and other similar nerdy professions. After high school when I was trying to figure out which science/engineering colleges to apply to, my father got posted to a town with a good architecture school. And that is how I landed up in an arts/architecture environment versus engineering.

After struggling at my new school for a while, I learned slowly but surely that architecture is a balance of art and technology. Behind a great piece of architecture is numerous hours of structural engineering, behind a material finish, there are material properties. Everything is interlinked, there is a science to every piece of art and vice versa. My final year thesis was on dematerialization of spaces, an understanding of how spaces had evolved from solid structures like the pyramids to the glass and steel structures of today, all because someone figured out how to create windows by creating flying buttresses. The other kind of dematerial space that I was getting really interested in, was the cinematic space or the screen space where people could get immersed in for hours and mentally teleport. There is a lot of literature around this, and if all the architecture theory is anything to go by, its good to steer clear of it when given a chance.

Urban Matter Inc is a continuation of that thought process that started close to 15 years ago as an attempt to see architecture from the lens of technology. As Archigram once envisioned the walking cities as the future of cities, it is my hope to see what is next when it comes to how people live their lives in cities and present day technology. Being true to this vision is our hope for 2015. Happy New Year everyone!

I wish I would’ve made a note, every time I had an idea for a new blog post. It would’ve been an interesting list. I’ve had a bunch of ideas and have been wanting to write about them these past few months, just haven’t been able to get down to it. Today’s attempt can be attributed to me being sick and bed ridden for two days and suddenly having some time to think about things. Yesterday I spent a lot of time watching Netflix and today I spent time catching up on a bit of emailing which I’d been avoiding for a while. It felt like the right time to write something today. A cheerful day for a blog post.

Back to topics to write about. I wanted to write about terribly important things like race and gender in entrepreneurship, roles of artists in arts organizations, our decision as a company to take up more commercial work to pay the bills. Then there were the other more personal things like importance of friends and friendship in ones life, thoughts on self respect, work life balance, starting a family, health concerns, life experiences, then the list of existential nothings like the fear of dying alone, thoughts on faith and religion, on lost time, aging, not understanding why we do what we do.

But I guess one thing which I’ve been focusing a lot on these past few weeks is how much time should I spend on social meida. As mundane, irrelevant and millennial this sounds, its been taking a lot of my headspace. June was a testament of me going a bit nuts with instagram and facebook. A wait of a couple of minutes for the ATM meant that I needed to check my instagram or facebook account, getting into the elevator to go up to my third floor apartment meant that I needed to check my phone, walking to work meant I needed to feverishly dig into my bag for my phone, standing in a grocery line, waiting for a drink, talking to a friend, watching TV, as if being distracted wasn’t enough, I needed to be distracted from a distraction. It was endless and consistent, the feed never stopped and I never stopped browsing through it. The worst was at work. Every time I would feel uncomfortable or couldn’t find the right solution to a problem, or couldn’t crack something, there it was again, me typing those alphabets, f..a..c into the browser and it would auto-populate and viola, a whole lot of information for nothing, like empty calories. Weirdly so, I would keep running into people I am facebook or instagram friends with and neither of us would really acknowledge the other, so it seemed almost false and useless to spend time reading about these people or seeing their pictures in the virtual world when clearly we wanted nothing to do with each other in the real world.

I gave up eating bread for a week because gluten seemed to give me heartburn. I never really got back to eating gluten after that week. I tried the same with social media – one weekend, I decided, okay I am going to try and stop for a bit, take a bit of breather, not for day or so but for a week or so. I had to finish a couple of proposals that weekend and every time an urge to open up a social media window would arise, I would resist it. Weirdly so, I was a lot more focused, I had better ideas, my research was a lot more contained. My urge to dig into my bag for my phone kinda died. Waiting in line, meant, well.. waiting in line and feeling annoyed and noticing things. I didn’t know what anyones July 4th plans were, who went where, I knew that I was working and watching the world cup at home. It was kinda relieving.

But there are no happy endings other than in Bollywood films. After the initial relief, I suddenly felt, well – a bit alone. Sometimes social media is just a way of keeping up with people who you don’t phone, email or see on a regular basis, like a friend moving to a new city, or a cousin studying abroad, or a nephew beating the crap outta another kid during a taekwondo fight. These are few things I do care about.

Also, I have an eye for pretty pictures, I see a nice image and I need to share it, with strangers and friends alike so after a week or so I decided I would continue posting a small bit on instagram and work related stuff on facebook. When friends show support for a project I busted my ass on or like a video of my dog tap dancing, I do feel teeny weeny bit loved. Its awful and shallow but it does kinda feel good sometimes. I guess people like approval, like dogs like being petted. On the other hand, Its not just about being fakely liked on social media, its also about liking/supporting stuff other people post, kids, dogs, family vacations, business breakthroughs, personal projects (I draw a line at selfies though). I also like to share the stuff I believe in, like desi chics surfing and kicking ass, feminist stuff, culture stuff, art stuff.

The other day, I checked my feed after ages, and noticed that I hadn’t responded to a message from a close cousin or commented on a picture my best friend from undergrad posted of us together. Its just that I haven’t been checking facebook very frequently. I don’t know how to figure out my social media conundrum. I wonder if I could get facebook and Instagram in a digest format so that I don’t feel the need to check it constantly as if I am going to miss something.

How do I solve this? Have you solved it? How do you moderate your social media intake? I guess I’ll figure it out in time but for now, I am a bit clueless. FYI, I am on twitter, feedly and flipboard all the time and I don’t have any crisis going on there because these platforms are not personal for me, they are sources of information and news that I choose to follow. I do plan to write about race, gender politics, entrepreneurship, unpaid bills and existentialism. For now I just need to figure out how to not check facebook and Insta and still be able to keep in touch with people who matter.

2013 was a year of being an entrepreneur, a small business owner in the city of New York. It has finally settled in. One notices being on the outside when one’s instagram feed is full of friends who work for big agencies attending their no expense spared holiday parties. Strippers, robots, water sports, expensive Manhattan cocktail bars, its all there. The smaller shops settle for disco balls and DIY photo booths but there is still someone paying for it all. One also notices the difference when one is working through the holidays and on vacation the moment the ‘holiday season’ ends. Oh yes! We are definitely on the outside. One other development is the quick loss of critical thinking. When you work for someone else, you can complain, you can assert how your creative spirit is being throttled by the wicked money mongers who run the company. When you work for yourself, things are a bit more complicated, a lot of your time is spent building your offering, whether it is a cookie, a spin class or an app. Being critical of the kind of work you are doing is tough because that is everybody else’s job, your peers, your competitors and maybe even your mum. Your job is to believe that whatever you are making is worth its while. We did that most of last year, we believed that we could make something worthwhile together thereby kicking out the people who did not share the same values. This year we decided that we wanted to have one thing common with the rest of what we forsake to start this company. We decided that along with believing in what we make/built/conceive that people love/like/dislike, its our responsibility to make money as a business. Do businesses that don’t make money even exist. I think they do, there are a lot of businesses that have investments that they can never really make good on. The other business model that does not make money was ours, where we all paid bills through our freelance income but not by doing what we called was our ‘business’ which was creating experience design projects focussed on data, stories and participation. Do we make money as a consulting business or start making products is still in the works. For now, the new year isn’t without promise and business. There is plenty of both somewhere someplace, we just need to dig it out.

Its been precisely a year since my last full time job. I’ve completed a year doing my own thing. The new year has been good for us. Under our art collective umbrella – Artist Build Collaborative, we were named one of the 104 finalists for the prestigious Artplace grants, next to institutions like Creative Time, New Museum and Time Square Alliance. We won the Black Rock Grant this year for an urban intervention project. We were finalists for twoÂ interestingÂ opportunities, one for a large scale project for Beam Camp in New Hampshire and the other for a project in the Stewert New Media Center in Orono Maine. None of which we won but it felt good to be a finalist. Â We are working with some very exciting new people that include videographers and creative technologists for our upcoming projects. I have been consulting part time for a start up called littleBits whose mission and product I admire and love. Rick and I also completed an 8 week class around Business Plan Development that helped us understand and think financially about things that we love doing. Its helped me think of Urban Matter Inc more as a scalable business and less as I like to call it ‘my own thing’.

We’ve also been extremely busy working on consulting gigs which for now has been paying the bills. We are hoping to grow into a moreÂ experientialÂ company where we use storytelling, film, architecture and our technology expertise to make fun and immersive things. There are a couple of projects that we are working on that might fall in this arena. One of them is called Wise Words and it is an interactive storytelling telling installation that revolves around stories of women who immigrated to this country in the earlier 20th century. This project will be displayed as a part of the New Museum Ideas City Festival at the storefront of an amazing architecture office called GTECTS alongside another interesting organization called miLES.

All in all things are moving forward and we are working a lot. We really hope to shift our focus to more experiential work at the intersection of urban design, technology and storytelling. I’ve been reading a lot of Brainpickings and the post about purpose really stands out – ‘How to find your pupose and do what you love‘. Its a great post and some very smart people talk about why you do what you do. We are doing a lot of new things and working with a lot of new technologies and people. Its not perfect, but I want to make sure we do a lot of work and get better. Ira Glass’s video on creativity explains creating good work really well. The top most priority for me is to have fun while working on something so that work doesn’t feel like work but more like creating an artistic experience. I look forward to going to the studio everyday. Its come to feel more like an experimental lab where we work on understanding new technologies and creating new experiences by brainstorming and experimentation. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don’t. The idea is to move in the direction of monetizing the things we love to make. I hope we’ve moved successfully in that direction by the time I get down to writing my next blog post. For now, Rick and I both have to wrap up a number of consulting gigs which might spill into summer time. After that we would seriously need to rethink why we are doing what we are doing, what we enjoy doing most and the million dollar question – how to make money doing what we love without having to do it all the time.

I did it, I left a fairly comfortable full time job at a prestigious design firm to start on my own. This happened in April of this year. Since then I’ve worked on an installation for a conference, organized a fundraiser for another installation, been to Venice to showcase a project at the architecture biennale, created an animation for a bunch of scientists, worked on two websites that are in production, curated speakers for a conference in Mumbai and gotten married. Its been a fairly tough yet exhilarating ride these past few months.

While feeling trapped in a full time job, I often read blog posts and articles about entrepreneurs who were doing their own thing to get inspired. There were stories of hardship, sweat, tears, failure, doubt, triumph and patience. Holding on to every word uttered by theseÂ veteransÂ of entrepreneurship I started out on my own and yes, its a unpredictable ride. Since I’m the person who is going the other way into Brooklyn to go to my studio while everyone else heads to more commercial parts of the city to go to their 9 to 5′s, I wonder sometimes if I am going the right way. Doubt comes easy when you are swimming against the tide. But work wise it is easier for me to go against the tide since very few things interest me and I like to do them my way. I hate authority and I certainly hate being told what to do. I like being my own boss but it does suck when that bi-weekly pay check doesn’t come in.

Clearly, the work that doesn’t pay is the one I want to work on since it is more interesting and when one relies on money solely from ones so called business to pay rent and bills, it gets tricky. I think the only time I thought so much about money was when I had just come to the US for my grad school or when I started undergrad school and had never been out of my parents home. The common pattern here being that one is broke when one is starting off. I am hoping that things will even out sooner than later and money won’t matter anymore. Not that it does matter a lot right now, other than the fact we make our own lunches and won’t probably take a decent holiday till end of next year.

So what am I doing right now? I am trying to do business development for our company Urban Matter Inc. It is a multidisciplinary creative studio. Why is it multidisciplinary ? Because doing just one thing bores me. What do I hope to achieve doing this? I hope to create, produce and get better at the craft of self expression through design and art. I believe in Ira Glass’s take on the creative process about creating work and creating a lot of it. I want to put in my 10,000 hours doing work at my own terms and hope that I don’t fail miserably. Freedom comes with a lot of responsibility and I am not known to be responsible so I might be in big trouble but I guess it is worth a shot. I am horrible with full time jobs. I have a problem with my temper. I am grumpy and morose and terrible when I am not happy with my work. I don’t think I would ever succeed outside of this world and then I do not know if I have what it takes to succeed as a business woman.

One thing that I’ve been trying to think about is what we want to sell as a company. What differentiates us, sets up apart. For now, its just the fact that we have some cool participatory, community driven work on our site, most of it is unpaid, some of it was done with non profits, some of it is selfÂ initiated. I mean if what sets me apart is my penchant for cool unpaid gigs, then I am in deep trouble. But it would be terrible to do work that doesn’t resonate with people. There is enough technology and connectivity out there to make a whole lot of difference and it would be great to build something worthwhile and gratifying that does pay.

I guess thats why I am where I am at, because I do get to pick and choose what I want to work on and how I want to spend my time. I’ve been told by friends that I look rested. Other than the fact I’ve been sleeping late because I make my own hours, I do get to get up and work on projects or look for projects that would make me happy.Â Making money off of good work should be a matter of time.Â Good work comes from time and patience. Hours working on something also make it better and hones it down to its bare basics and your style and voice emerges. Things are not so confusing then. Finding your voice and purpose and making money off of it is probably the best thing in the world and I hope I can get there someday.

I have been reading a lot of articles around creativity and design, passions and interests. This made me think about my job title and my interests. Are my interests aligned with my job title? Am I passionate about being a designer? Â All my adult life I have been a design advocate. However, my conclusion after my reads, is how little what we call things matter. At work today, a certain collegue was outlining how many different type of architects there were in the room, starting with content, information and technical, not to talk about the architect who wasn’t in the room – the one who builds buildings.

Design is such a loaded word that I doubt that it means anything. As Jack Schulze says in this very awesome article – “Some people (they are wrong) say design is about solving problems. Obviously designers do solve problems, but then so do dentists.” Since I have been calling myself a designer for a really long time, this comes as a relief. I don’t want to be a designer anymore, I just want to do my thing. Titles are over-rated, and unfortunately jobs get created around useless titles and vice versa. Is it the naming convention happy society that wants to silo everything and create such demarcations. As we try to create more roles and more titles, the problems around us get diluted. Being a designer doesn’t mean anything, nor does being an architect mean anything. One could have made an argument around being able to sketch or think in an organized manner but that doesn’t hold true any more either. What does hold true when talking about ones creative leanings, I think is personal interests and passion. Darren Aronofsky once said that making a movie was 95% management and 5% creativity. He makes films that people like, he is not necessarily a manager, he is a film maker. His interests lie in making good films and not in managing projects but managing projects are an important part of making good stuff. Which brings me to the point that even though my title has been that of a designer for most of my adult life, I have sketched a lot, outputted a lot of documentation and dealt with a lotÂ bureaucracy and notÂ necessarilyÂ produced a lot of design that people have actively used. I have filled titles whichÂ necessarilyÂ haven’tÂ been my interests.

Also, certain kinds of designs have nothing to do with my motivations and my interests. Craptastic words like design thinking and innovation make it even more difficult to call oneself a designer. Â I think all of us need to take a piece of paper and write down the correlation between what they are interested in, what their title is and what they do. If those three things don’t really match up, its time to give yourself a new title, a title that matches up with what you want to do next – Storyteller is a good one and so is Urbanist. Atleast those terms outline your interests and then you can expand your thinking to make them more tactical and build something interesting people would use. Design is a verb now. Calling myself a designer feels misleading even if it comes with a prefix (interaction and such). I might like creating interactions for mobile phones that help people create good habits but might hate to create a financial analytic tool because I don’t care about what people do with their finances. What kind of interaction designer does that make me then? Not a very good one.

Its time to bid adieu to just being called a designer or more precisely an interaction designer. Its time to embrace interests, passions and all the work being done in relation to our creative pursuits.

This is a question I have been trying to answer for over a year. Instead of a rant, I thought it better to do some research on the matter and get to the root of the problem. This is to primarily answer this question – Did I fulfill my role as a designer after I graduated from design school 10 years ago? Â The problem with working for design agencies is that you get caught in the design jargon and forget the real thing sometimes. Design process and methodology is as unique to designers as fingerprints to individuals. When everything starts getting standardized, then intuitive processes suffer. On the other hand, projects with no frameworks suffer from a lack of structured approach creating commotion. Which brings me back to the question – What is design? Were you and I meant to do what we are doing.

(noun) a specification of anÂ object, manifested by anÂ agent, intended to accomplishÂ goals, in a particularÂ environment, using a set of primitive components, satisfying a set ofrequirements, subject to constraints;

(verb, transitive) to create a design, in anÂ environment (where the designer operates)[3]

Another definition for design isÂ a roadmap or a strategic approach for someone to achieve a unique expectation. It defines the specifications, plans, parameters, costs, activities, processes and how and what to do within legal, political, social, environmental, safety and economic constraints in achieving that objective.

The last paragraph gives the impression that one can design the government, country, finance, healthcare and myriad other things in life. But it also sounds restrictive, where everything from legalese to politics have to be kept in mind. Design seems to feel more managerial. It feels void of intuition and feeling.

Here is another one from the Design Council of UK

Design is what links creativity and innovation. It shapes ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users or customers. Design may be described as creativity deployed to a specific end.â€™The Cox Review

Most of the results of design are visible, and that lends itself to another simple definition: â€˜Design is all around you, everything man-made has been designed, whether consciously or notâ€™.

The question therefore isn’t so much ‘what is design and why does it matter?’ but ‘how can I use good design to make the world around me better?’

‘Everything man-made has been designed, whether consciously or not’ pretty much sums it up. Design has been over specified, there are countless fields and types of design, I was trying to come to terms with ‘behavior’ design and someone sprung a ‘persuasive design’ at me the other day. Provocative articles about the death of design thinking and user experience add to the confusion and create a frenzy. Design for social change engaged me for a long long time till designers started to make a mess of it and I realized how little I knew about international development and governance (which doesn’t mean I should not be learning more about it).

I found this other slide as a part of a University of Illinois Chicago.

Design process is this case could be anything that spat out a bunch of specifications based on needs in the end. The rest of the pdf can be downloaded here.

Design is also loving the ideas you have to throw away. Â A more emotional response here.

Non-designers can design using design thinking and buying fantastic books on the subject. A nice article on design thinking in design observer – “Â One popular definition is that design thinking means thinking as a designer would, which is about as circular as a definition can be.”

Then there is design build, design research, design management, design strategy none of which I am particularly good at.

Here is a one of the nicer definitions of design I found online. More here.

Design is about finding a balance. Thereâ€™s a Japanese word for the place in between â€“ â€œmaâ€. Itâ€™s the interval of time between two things. Itâ€™s the point in the swing of a pendulum when the object switches from an upswing to a downswing. Itâ€™s the pause just between. Itâ€™s the moment just before something happens, or changes, or becomes clear, or comes into focus. But not yet. Itâ€™s the best part of the rollercoaster, right after the climb, and just before you fall. Itâ€™s anticipation. The space between. â€“ Ma

India won the Cricket World Cup a couple of days back, a trophy we haven’t won in over 20 years. Before we won that cup, the feeling in the bar we were watching the match at, was that of dejection or lets say ambivalence. We have been known to give up when good wickets like that of Sachin Tendulkar fall. No one really knows what happened this time. The youngsters, a lot of whose names I didn’t know played a consistent and thorough game. Players like Gautum Gambhir kept the game going slowly and surely eventually winning us the World Cup. It was spectacular. It was …ahem.. very unlike us, the team seemed disciplined, there was strategic thinking behind who came out to bat and bowl, no tempers were flaring and everyone including the fiery Harbhajan Singh was behaving themselves, that too *drumroll* under pressure and stress. What happened here, did we just get sick of bad leadership, was there some introspection?

This brings me back to some personal introspection. The past three months has seen me join a new job at a company called frog design, host a panel discussion for designwala, moderate another one for ARTfarm and push forward a bunch of personal projects. The past few months of madness amongst other things has led to a broader understanding of personal work methods and emotional & physical thresholds. The primary introspection being, if people push themselves a bit harder than their expectations, they can surprise themselves. There were a lot of ‘I cant’ in my vocabulary in the last few years. It happens when you go past the romantic stage in your career, when you start understanding your shortcomings as an employee, co-worker, collaborator and more. The only thing that can be said here is to keep a low profile and to clean up your skill by working hard on it. The only substitute to working hard is perhaps working smarter which brings me to working under stress & pressure, where the example of the Indian Cricket Team comes in handy.

Working under stress means that your adrenalin is pumping but you come across as if you have been relaxing on a beach. The quality is rare, some have it naturally and for wound up people like me, it has to be cultivated with utter discipline. I am the kind of a person who works when the pressure is on. Being able to work smart under stress and pressure has been challenging. It has taken, time and experience to cultivate a consistent work method but has been worth it because I know I won’t screw up the task when the time arrives to deliver the goods. It also means that I have been able to expand my scope and incorporate more work and move up the food chain.

10 healthy work methods that I have learnt by falling in a ditch are as follows :

1. Distribute work, if you have a team, don’t try to be a martyr and do it all

2. Take small breaks to relax your eyes and muscles

3. Don’t blame people when they don’t deliver, just don’t work with them again.

4. Take some time off when a big project finishes

5. If you think the world is coming to an end, zoom out and look at the larger picture

6. If you don’t get everything done on your to-do list, there is always a tomorrow

7. Forgive yourself, shit happens

8. Start early, last minute is not always good and can create unnecessary stress.

The list up top is very forgiving except for number 9. Pushing yourself harder however has a lot of weight. Everything else revolves around it. Doing something that is challenging or makes you uncomfortable also makes you aware of your boundaries and your abilities. It is important to take those risks just to understand what one is capable of. If it works out, awesome, if not, then forgive yourself and move on.

Just elaborating on couple of things listed above, starting early is something which is very new to me but has been helpful in cutting down unnecessary stress, it has also helped me develop better ideas and have time to get feedback. Another interesting aspect of working on creative projects is working with people. It is good to get a good understanding of a person’s skill set and limitations and limit ones expectations to that. There is no point depending on someone to do something they are not capable of delivering. This is not in the above list but stay away from people who do not care about your vision and work. If there is light at the end of the tunnel like work experience, cash in the bank, then go for it, if there is nothing, simply stay away and save yourself the self doubt negative people can instill in you.

I am not trying to write an ‘eat, pray, love’ here. These are simply the ways in which I have been able to create a conducive environment to work in while working a full time gig and numerous side projects. Having a hobby helps as well but I don’t have any and don’t plan on having any. I do want to travel more and get an understanding of the services and design across the globe.

One more thing that has struck me is actually doing the work and designing the product if you want to make it. There is no point in waiting for the right time to make something happen. If you have an idea, atleast sketch it out, send a few emails out, sense its feasibility and your attachment to it. More often than not, you will abandon it, however if you don’t, then it could be a live product. Something that you thought of, designed and created. Even if the product fails, atleast you tried vs being one of those people who are always saying ‘I thought of facebook before Zuckerberg did’. Those people are the worst and you don’t want to be one of those because then you would be a wannabe and no one wants to be wannabe. Amen.

I am starting a new job at a global design agency called Frog Design in Jan and along with the nervousness that comes with starting a new gig, I am reassessing my role as a designer. According to me, the definition of a good designer is someone who can come up with simple solutions to complex problems. I was at work a couple of days back and it dawned on me how instead of understanding how to solve problems, I have always worked around them or chosen to ignore them. I am not really creative when it comes to things in my life, for example, if my machine is choking, I just work slower, I forget to update the OS for my phone since it seems to work fairly okay without the updates till I get locked out of an application that needs me to update, I watched analog TV till the cable company cut me off and then I reluctantly switched to digital, I wear my shoes till the soles come off and wear my sweaters till the elbows are frayed. One would call me a laggard in technology adoption lingo and just sloppy otherwise. I would say that people learn to live with new things when the older technology, sweaters and shoes just wont do. However, if I am the person who has always watched television with commercials all my life and formulated a strategy behind doing something fun, like play with my dog everytime a commercial comes on, then I am probably not the guy who is going to come up with the idea for TIVO. That is because I have decided to work around the problem and not on the problem. How do the lives of designers influence what they design at work ?Â How can we solve other peoples problems when we sometimes work around our own. I have often wondered about that.

There are people who are naturally creative and then there are people who are taught to be creative. One of the first exercises I was given at the undergrad design school I went to, was to draw the rear of an elephant. I could always draw well but if someone asked me draw an elephant, I would probably draw a side view. But envisioning an elephants backside was tough. It was about thinking in three dimension, that’s what architects do and my parents had chosen to send me to a school that was to make one out of me. Luckily architecture was not that tough, since I went to a modernist school based off of principals taught in Bauhaus, a bunch of it was about the play of straight lines and planes and there weren’t any more elephants to be drawn. The point here is that you can probably be really good at aping the masters of modernism but suck at drawing the elephants behind. One is a learnt process and the other one needs you to use your imagination. I think people who use their imaginations are better designers which brings me back to my first point about solving problems. To draw an elephants behind, I would have to move my focus from the side of the elephant which is how I saw it in my second grade spelling book and consciously move myself to the back of the big animal. The same thing applies to working on other peoples problems and hence designing. You just have to take your lazy ass out of that couch and imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes, someone who is bothered by commercials in their TV shows, someone who doesn’t have a dog to pet, what would you do now in the other person’s shoes? That’s what designers do, look at other peoples problems and try to solve it from the other person’s perspective.

Having started my career in architecture, I now think I should have stuck to it. It is easier to take liberties with architectural spaces and pass off ambiguous spaces in the name of artistic license. Not so much with technology and software, I don’t think any users would appreciate smart ass art projects swimming around in their software when they are trying to organize their finances or buy plane tickets. Being a user experience designer and working in technology is a bigger pain in the ass than I thought. Technology is ingrained in our life and we use it to do practically everything, from paying bills to looking for restaurants to writing blogs like this since a lot of us don’t have hobbies anymore. The point is, being a late adopter incase of technology and trying to design for an increasingly advanced technologically savvy crew of users is tough. If it was up-to me, we would still be wearing a bunch of atrocious looking augmented reality helmets fighting imaginary predators and fancying ourselves to be the future of cyberspace. Cyberspace however looks very different now, it does involve total immersion and interaction but through social networks and mobile technology. Design has humanized technology contrary to my revolutionary futuristic cyborg predictions. The interesting thing about humanizing technology is that you can give people the power to not only interact with it but give them a whole system to work within. So designing technology actually is about solving a problem. For example, book your Zipcar over the internet, put in your location, find a parking lot close to your house, use your magnetic key card to open the car, use your mobile phone app to increase or decrease the number of hours of use and look for security numbers to open parking lots to return the car. The user uses multiple technologies here to solve a problem, which was to get from place A to B. By the end of it technology was used as a means to an end and not the other way round.

This brings me back to my point of people adapting to anything if it serves the purpose. Before the phones has the capacity to store numbers, people memorized phone numbers, calling someone meant knowing their phone number, watching TV meant, dealing with commercials, using a computer meant being tethered to a physical space. My concerns about being a good user experience designer with a track record of late adoptions in technology have been laid to rest. If I need to buy the latest and the greatest, I will buy it, till then I will make do with technology that works for me since being a designer shouldn’t involve changing my life, like being an actor shouldn’t mean living a role when the actor goes to bed or eats dinner with his family. My creative memories as a child are not about playing video games or the Wii, they are about drawing endless imaginary scenes with chalk on the cement floors of our house in Madras. They are about watching my brothers build stuff out of random containers, boxes, bottles, that my mother used to keep for us to play with after she had used up whatever was inside the bottle or the containers. Chalk, cement floors and random lids and containers kept us pretty involved and entertained, they were a means to an end. We learned to draw and build without using a computer, without any real toys and without any real fuss. I would like to think that designing for people is like that as well, its not about using the latest and the greatest, it about using the most appropriate, if you are given a project to design a toy that can teach a child to draw well, remember chalks and cement floors have their magic too. Technology does come first but only to the technologist, not to the designer and certainly not to the user.

I have been thinking a lot about idealism these past few months. Just checked on the definition for the same. It means the opposite of materialism and realism. Earlier in the year I was offered a job with a big ad agency in the city which I had turned down to work with a smaller firm doing cutting edge work. Turning down big money was easier than it sounds. I didn’t have to think twice. It is not tough to keep a decent standard of living in a small sum if one doesn’t have a lot of material needs. As time progresses, the need to create a practice that focuses on creating some kind of social change becomes more and more urgent. Is it charity I talk about? No. It is a realization that there needs to be shift in the type of thinking we are accustomed to. Why are academic institutions full of idealism and the real world is totally devoid of it ? Both the grad and undergrad schools I went to were very idealistic and liberal. My undergraduate school in Ahmedabad was particularly idealistic. It followed the open campus thinking where one doesn’t lock the campus and the general public and other forms of living creatures like dogs and birds and an occasional monkey is allowed into the studio. The environment is open, ripe for new ideas and change. Leaving an academic institution entails going back to where you started from. It is upto the student who is now a designer in this competitive world to figure out what they want to build and how they want to progress. As life takes over, so does material living. Idealism diminishes and realism takes over. Savings for a news house, college for kids, a new car, a new home theater console. Then life takes over, friends, family, society, standard of living.

The Essential Gandhi, a book by Louis Fischer lies on my bedside. I usually just open it once in a while and read a page or two. It doesn’t make sense to read that book in a sequence. That book is all about ‘I am feeling lucky today’ syndrome. Open a page, it may make your break your day. Gandhi didn’t really believe in possessing anything. He felt the need to treat his family, like he treated his employees or like his followers. He talks about his estrangement with his brother and how that mattered less to him that loosing sight of his cause. Gandhi was an extremist in a way. His idealism knew no bounds. He believed in non possession, non violence and celibacy. He was a practical and a strategic man though. He lived in an era of no social networking tools and yet he managed to mobilize and organize huge masses of people using tools like transistors, prayer meetings and total devotion to his cause. The point in question here is purpose. A human without a purpose is probably not much of a human at all.

I am somehow fascinated with the religion I was born in – Sikhism. It is an extremely practical religion and talks about living in Grahastha ashram ie living with a family, living with ones duty towards society but having a bigger purpose in life. It strikes a balance between Gandhi’s extreme idealism and the regular persons obligation to his family and society. So convert to Sikhism – No, but think hard about your purpose in the world.

Are you here to make sure people drink more Coca Cola because you created an exciting punchline for a campaign, get into more debt because you were onboard a credit card strategy team, buy more clothes because you created a fashionline, consume more because you want to sell more ? Stop working in advertising or stop doing business – No, but do your bit, give back, not as charity but as something which betters the existence of mankind – Create a system.

You like cricket, then figure out how kids playing cricket in the gullies of India can get broader opportunities to test out for a team. You like shoes, then see if you can develop a strategy that can shod children in poor nations when someone buys a pair of shoes. You like to travel, cook, eat, draw, try widening the scope, adding a system, a community and create a network of creative thinking. Think big, small, think about things you like and see if you can create a ecosystem of giving back. You might create successful businesses, you may fail – Who cares, till the time you did something you enjoyed and tied more lives to it and developed something. Stop being grown up all the time, stop charging money for everything, stop trying to suck up to your boss, stop being comfortable. Then turning down jobs with fat pay checks wont be very difficult, feeling secure all the time won’t be tough too. You will have shed some of your possessions, gained some happiness, developed a vision and above all a purpose and might even lose some weight in the process. That would be something to write home about right ? So do it already.